If you’re looking for last-minute holiday shopping money, skip looking in the couch cushions and jars in your home and focus on your dresser, purse or glove compartment.

While coins can be found in couches, millions go to waste every year in unclaimed winning lottery tickets. Many millions.

According to Ohio Lottery records, more than $269.2 million in winning lottery prizes have gone unclaimed in the past decade. Last year alone, tickets for $38 million in prizes went uncashed.

Praveen Patel, who sells hundreds of tickets each day at the Downtown store he manages, was incredulous at last year’s total.

“Did you say $38 million? Wow!” he said.

He was even more dumbfounded to learn that $143 million — more than half of the money that went unclaimed in the past decade — were prizes for instant tickets, the ones that tell you instantly whether you’ve won.

“Sometimes, the customer doesn’t know that they’ve won,” Patel explained. “Sometimes, they hand me the ticket and I tell them they won $50, and they say, ‘I thought it was only $5!’ ”

Lottery winners have 180 days to claim their prizes. For instant winners, the clock starts when the instant game “closes,” according to Danielle Frizzi-Babb, communications director for the Ohio Lottery. The closing dates are available at locations where the tickets are sold and on the lottery’s website.

Records show that $40 million in prizes went unclaimed in the Mega Millions game, which involves picking six numbers out of 75 in one pool and one out of 15 in another. Another $22 million in unclaimed prizes are from the daily Pick 3 game, while $19 million was unclaimed from the Pick 4 daily game.

Some people win a small amount and decide it’s either not worth the hassle or that they’ll cash it in later — and then forget.

Some people forget to check their numbers.

And some who check “don’t know they won,” said Chuck Strutt, executive director of the Multi-State Lottery Association. For example, he said, many people don’t realize that the second prize in the Powerball game is $1 million. They check to see if they matched all the numbers and don’t understand the many smaller prizes that are part of those games.

Instant games can be complicated as well.

Vera Thomas, who bought about $45 worth of lottery tickets from Beer Dock East in Whitehall last week, said she double-checks her tickets to make sure she doesn’t overlook a winner.

“I check them, then I swipe them,” she said, pointing at the electronic ticket readers.

Aaron Meredith, another patron of Beer Dock, said he pays close attention to his tickets. “I don’t let them get out of my hands. If there’s

money on the line — it’s like having a receipt for something you bought.”

No organization tracks the unclaimed prizes for all of the 43 states that have lotteries, said David Gale, head of the National Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, based in Geneva, Ohio.

Not all of the unclaimed tickets are of the $1 or $2 variety, either. Records show two tickets worth $1 million went unclaimed in the past year. Since 2004, 28 tickets worth $250,000 were not cashed, and neither were a dozen worth $175,000 or 36 worth $100,000.

One of the unclaimed $1 million tickets, from the Powerball game, was sold at a Marathon gas station in New Carlisle, about 55 miles west of Columbus. That prince of a ticket turned into a frog when it expired in July.

How can someone overlook that kind of money?

“Think about your daily life and all the things that are going on,” Frizzi-Babb said. “People forget, get busy and miss the drawing.”

No one knows why a $100,000 ticket, sold at the Beer Dock East went unclaimed in 2007.

Owner Mike Sweeney was worried that another $100,000 winner would become a loser as a winning Buckeye Five ticket was about to expire.

He asked around for a week and then finally asked one of his regulars. She thought her ticket was a loser, but “I checked it for her and she couldn't believe it. It was a $100,000 ticket. I almost had to call the squad for her,” Sweeney said.

With so many winners going unclaimed, the question should be asked: What’s worse, spending $1 on a lottery ticket and losing, or buying a winning ticket and not claiming your prize?

“That’s a tough one,” said Frizzi-Babb of the Ohio Lottery. “I would feel devastated.”

She said she once heard from a woman who found an old winning ticket and tried to cash it. While she doesn’t recall the specifics, she knows “it was well after the 180-day deadline. I felt terrible.”

What happens to prize money that goes unclaimed? It varies by state, but in Ohio, it “goes to the unclaimed prize fund, which goes into our profits and helps fund education,” Frizzi-Babb said.